The Mortuary of Fear
by LoLoGreeneVines
Summary: Mantarou Takaishi had everything he had ever wanted; a wonderful wife, an excellent job, good social standing... and fifty-seven mysteriously healthy corpses in the Karakura Hospital mortuary waiting to be autopsied. The end of his shift couldn't come quickly enough.


**Author's notes: This fic is set during the Arrancar Invasion arc, the day after Ulquiorra and Yammy turn up in Karakura and the latter goes all Dementor on part of the town. I thought it might be amusing to write the aftermath of the incident from the perspective of Ryuken Ishida's clueless, neurotic, borderline-paranoid head coroner. Mantarou Takaishi is my original character, but on the off-chance that anybody ever wants to use him for anything, you have my permission (so long as you tell me so I can see what sorts of things you make him do). :D**

* * *

Mantarou Takaishi was, in every way, perfectly happy with the state of his life. He had a wonderful wife, an excellent job as head coroner at Karakura Hospital, along with the heightened social standing the job and his qualifications entailed, and he got on well with his boss.

Well, at any rate, he was utterly terrified of Doctor Ishida and his eagerness to please kept him in the General Director's good graces.

It just so happened that this morning Mantarou had arrived in the mortuary to find at least fifty covered cadavers lined up on trolleys against the wall. Staring at the day's workload in disbelief, Mantarou heard a slight cough behind him and spun around, only to find Doctor Ishida standing in the doorframe behind him.

"Ah, Doctor Ishida!" Mantarou exclaimed, avoiding his formidable-looking boss' eyes as best he could and hoping he came across as respectful. "Good morning, sir! I didn't expect to see you..."

"Or such an heavy workload for the day, I imagine," Doctor Ishida interrupted, swiftly. Mantarou nodded in fervent agreement as the General Director looked over the mass of corpses with a sweeping gaze. "Fifty-seven, altogether. I'm sorry to land such a job on you with no warning, Takaishi, but seeing as Matsuda is on holiday and Hinomoto has telephoned in unwell, you will have to autopsy these bodies yourself."

"It's not a problem, sir!" Mantarou declared. "You can't predict when people are going to die!"

"Indeed," Doctor Ishida said, glancing down at the floor as he pushed his glasses further up his nose with his right hand. "Because there are far too many cadavers for one person to autopsy alone in a short amount of time, I have already taken a look at them myself along with Doctor Isshin Sh... ah, Kurosaki. We are in agreement that all of them suffered from heart attacks. All you need to do is to provide your signature to the relevant paperwork saying so. Now, I need a cigarette before my meeting with my son."

"You got it, boss!"

Doctor Ishida turned to leave the mortuary, giving Mantarou one last glance before the door shut behind him. "Thank you, Takaishi."

As the door banged shut behind Doctor Ishida, Mantarou found himself alone with the cadavers and wondered why he had ever decided to become a coroner.

Sighing heavily, Mantarou put on his lab coat and sat down at the desk in the corner, upon which Doctor Ishida had left a fresh stack of half-filled in forms. Surely enough, they each carried the distinctive loopy signature of Ryuken Ishida and an untidy scrawl which looked vaguely "Kurosaki"-ish, and listed the "cause of death" as an heart attack, but it wouldn't hurt to be sure before he signed them off, would it? Even the best were wrong sometimes, and there was something awfully fishy about this whole situation. Each day in the hospital usually brought two or three corpses; fifty-seven was an unprecedented number. And for such a large number to die of a single, natural cause...

Mantarou hesitantly made his way over to the neat row of trolleys and pinched the corner of the sheet covering the nearest corpse, lifting it to get a view of the dead man's pallid head and torso. Dispassionately raking his eyes over the body, as many hundreds of autopsies over the years had taught him how to, he noticed something most unusual; there was not a scratch on the cadaver.

His eyes widening in surprise, Mantarou lowered the sheet back over the corpse and moved on to the next one, once again delicately lifting the plastic to reveal a pristine, dead torso.

Shouldn't there be incision marks, if Doctor Ishida and this "Doctor Kurosaki" had determined the cause of the deaths to be heart attacks?

Mantarou pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering what exactly Doctor Ishida was trying to hide. Could it be a simple case of the hospital's General Director simply trying to make life easier for him, on the one day when twenty-five times the average daily number of corpses came in? No, that would be medical malpractice, and Doctor Ishida may be terrifying, but he couldn't be a fraud.

Could he?

No, Mantarou thought. Doctor Ishida must have had some other way to tell that these two had suffered from heart attacks.

Well, there was a sure-fire way to be certain...

Three minutes later, Mantarou had established that each and every one of the bodies looked perfectly healthy on the surface, if one disregarded the fact that they were dead. Fifteen minutes after that, Mantarou had three of the cadavers lying on slabs around him, each one with their chest cavities opened up to reveal their gelatinous, congealing internal organs. As protocol demanded, he had given each of them a once-over for obvious internal damage, of which there was none, before moving in to examine the first one's heart in detail.

Mantarou poked around for a good five minutes, searching for the tell-tale scarring indicative of an heart attack, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Setting down the first scalpel and spinning around to the second of the corpses, Mantarou picked up the scalpel beside the second corpse and began searching around the man's heart. Again, there wasn't a trace of a scar. Mantarou repeated his routine on the third corpse, once again finding that the cadaver's heart appeared to be in perfect condition.

Blinking in disbelief, Mantarou stared at the stack of forms on the desk and wondered how Doctor Ishida could, in good conscience, mark all of these bodies off as having suffered from heart attacks when the first three he had tried all appeared to be in perfect condition.

"He's hiding something," Mantarou muttered to himself as he pottered around the mortuary, pacing in circles. "The obvious question would be _how_ these people all died, but it's really strange that Doctor Ishida is adamant that something happened which clearly didn't..."

The cogs slowly turned, eventually hitting upon a solution which appeared to fit.

_He did it, and this Isshin Kurosaki is his accomplice._

Mantarou's eyes widened with fear, the notion that his boss might be a serial-murderer refusing to leave his mind. Quickly making his way back to the first of the dissected bodies, Mantarou immediately began conducting a full autopsy in order to determine what could possibly be the _real_ cause of death. After all, if Doctor Ishida had killed these fifty-seven people, surely he had to have had _some_ murder weapon?

Mantarou quickly took samples of the contents of the cadaver's stomach and blood residue from the aorta and stored them in test-tubes he had retrieved from the cupboard under his desk, before turning his attention to the body's head and searching the cranium for any visible signs of blunt force trauma. Feeling neither a bump, nor a crack, nor any traces of dried blood, Mantarou scratched his head. Making a decision, Mantarou covered the corpse with its cloth and opened the double doors into the mortuary, wheeling the corpse's trolley into the corridor and locking the door behind him. It would not do for some elderly lady to take a wrong turn on her way to the toilets and end up in a room full of corpses by mistake.

Mantarou pushed the trolley up the corridor and into a foyer, pushing a button on the wall and cursing his bad back as he waited for a lift. The first one to arrive was mercifully empty, so Mantarou wheeled the trolley in and pushed the button to go down.

After thirty seconds, the lift came to a halt and the doors opened, and Mantarou wheeled the trolley down the new corridor and into a room he knew housed a large MRI scanner.

"Ah, good morning, Takaishi," said the bored-looking technician in the corner of the room, huddling over a large tank. "Is there anything I can do to help you? I'm just refilling the scanner's liquid helium supply, but it'll be ready to use in just a second."

"Glad to hear it," Mantarou said, closing the door behind him and peeling the cloth away from the corpse's face. "Do you think you could help me with an MRI scan of this cranium?"

"Ah. Suspected blunt-force trauma?" the technician asked knowledgeably, quickly wheeling the helium canister through a door into the next room and removing his thick gloves.

"Something like that, anything," Mantarou responded, as the two hoisted the cadaver onto the platform which would roll into the scanner. The technician pressed a button and the body disappeared into the scanner. Mantarou and the technician retreated into the next room, taking the empty trolley with them, and switched on the computer. When the relevant programme was up and running, Mantarou rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

"Right, let's see what's going on inside his head."

* * *

"Nothing. Nothing, Nothing. How can there _possibly_ be nothing?"

Mantarou paced the mortuary again, scowling at the mass of corpses against the wall before kicking the trolley's wheel in frustration.

"Are you done yet, Takaishi?"

Mantarou spun around to face the source of the voice and was horrified to see his boss accompanied by a scruffy-looking man in a lab-coat, whose goofy grin couldn't quite disguise an almost scary air of competence he seemed to exude. Mantarou winced, praying that his boss hadn't witnessed his attack on the trolley, and straightened up, forcing a smile in case the notion of making him the next victim was playing on Doctor Ishida's mind. Even if it wasn't, something told Mantarou that the scruffy man would probably be handy with a weapon...

"Ah! Doctor Ishida!" Mantarou cried, taking an involuntary step backwards. "Actually, I'm afraid I haven't been able to find anything! There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these bodies!"

Doctor Ishida blinked. "They're all dead. If nothing else, I think _that_ counts as 'something wrong'."

Suddenly, the scruffy man spoke. "Hey, Ryuken, I thought we had agreed that they were all heart attacks."

"We had," Doctor Ishida said, pointedly raising an eyebrow at Mantarou.

Mantarou jumped about a foot in the air, by now thoroughly spooked. "Of course, sir! They were all heart attacks, sir! I'll sign the paperwork right away, sir! You can count on me, sir!"

Doctor Ishida gave the ghost of a smile, and Mantarou nearly died of fright where he was. "Glad to hear it. Oh, Takaishi, thank you for being so thorough. I'll make sure you get a pay-rise."

Mantarou stood stock still, succumbing to the fear as Doctor Ishida and the scruffy man turned and heading straight back out of the door.

"Ah, that's really not necessary," Mantarou eventually said, nearly in hysterical tears, as the mortuary door banged shut behind the suspected mass-murderers, once again leaving him alone with the cadavers.

_Well, now I know how they died_, Mantarou thought. _Doctor Ishida must have scared them to death._


End file.
